


A Cup of Cocoa

by PeniG



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Gen, Guardian of Soho, World War II, outsider pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-21
Updated: 2020-10-21
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:48:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27137536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PeniG/pseuds/PeniG
Summary: It's a big responsibility to be Mr. Fell's charlady. Mrs. Lavender doesn't know who this Mr. Gabriel is, or why Mr. Fell is afraid of him, but fear and shortages will not deter her from bringing him what he needs to recover from the visit.
Comments: 43
Kudos: 186





	A Cup of Cocoa

**Author's Note:**

> This is relatively early in the Blitz and shortages weren't as bad as they would be eventually, but I make the assumption that poorer neighborhoods run out more quickly than more affluent ones do, because that's historically consistent. My working class London speech patterns are based primarily on the dialog of comparable people in Golden Age mystery novels.
> 
> Readers of The Akashic Records will recognize Mrs. Lavender, who appears in "Resumption of Service" and is mentioned in "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning," but not having read those works will not be a hindrance to reading this one.
> 
> Middle-aged ladies are the sergeants of civilian life, and we would all be lost without them.

Edna Lavender had been helping Mr. Fell rehearse his magic act, the better to amuse children in the tube during air raids with, and they were both nearly paralyzed with giggles, when he dropped all his cards and turned pale. “ _Oh_. Oh, _dear_ \- “

Mrs. Lavender’s stomach lurched. She knew that expression, but not on _this_ face, which was variously smiling or stern or sad or pensive or flustered or vague or smug or hopeful or peevish or fretful or even (on one occasion in her personal experience) terrifying in a specific way that gave her considerable satisfaction in retrospect, since the person on whom it had been turned had behaved very differently ever since. But Mr. Fell did _not_ turn white as a newly-bleached sheet, and his hands did _not_ tremble and flutter like burning wisps of paper wafting up from the flame that had burned it, and his voice did _not_ choke and gasp in his throat, and his eyes did _not_ go wide and fixed and glassy like a cornered rabbit’s. The sight of all these things that shouldn’t happen _happening_ made her feel all the solid earth of Soho dropping out from beneath her feet, but if she dropped with it, while Mr. Fell looked like _that,_ catastrophe would surely follow, so she stooped to scoop up the scattered cards and snapped: “Mr Fell! Whatever is the matter?”

“Oh! Oh, nothing, dear lady, nothing at all,” he lied, simple pallor giving way to a greenness around the gills which made her think of running for a basin he could be sick in; but he was still busy lying and snatching up cards and coins and handkerchiefs and little balls and throwing them into his top hat. “There’s he’s I I I I’d, I’d forgotten, an appointment, a man coming, he mustn’t, all this, he’ll be here any moment, if you could just just delay him a little while I clean all this up, only a moment if you would please oh dear if he sees this -“

Mr. Fell never made appointments, or cared what got left lying about in the back room, or turned a hair when he lied, whether to policemen or to hulking thugs with knuckledusters. “Don’t you worry, Mr. Fell,” said Mrs. Lavender. “You take all the time you need. I’ll pop up front and keep an eye out for him.” She snatched up her broom and her dustpan and sallied out onto the shop floor to pretend to clean. Mr. Fell was very particular about where she was and wasn’t allowed to clean, but she could pretend like billy-oh. 

She had barely begun when heavy feet pounded up the steps outside and both doors flew open, the bell jangling in alarm above the head of a large broad too-bright smiling man, who pushed all the cold damp air in the street ahead of him, as if to knock her down with it. “Aziraphale!” He bellowed, with a heartiness that curdled her blood.

Mrs. Lavender hoisted her broom and charged. “Were you raised in a pigsty?” She demanded. “I just waxed these floors yesterday and here you go tracking half the muck in town in with you! Do you think that mat’s down there to look pretty? Wipe your feet like a civilized person or stay out!”

Startling violet eyes looked down at her, as she might look at a stray cat that had darted between her feet when her arms were full of marketing. “Who are you?”

“I’m the person who cleans this floor, you great lummox. Shoo!” She approached, flicking the broom at him in the absence of a tail to puff up and twitch.

The broad mouth opened, revealing the straightest, whitest, least convincing teeth she’d ever seen, and the man laughed. The sound made her cringe inwardly, but she kept advancing, locking her knees so they wouldn’t give way. “Wipe my feet,” he said. “What _will_ they think of next? All right, all right, if that’s the custom.” He stepped back outside and made a great show of wiping his wingtips. (How many coupons had he wasted on those? And _where_? None of the shops had shoes these days, not even plain work boots, and if that suit wasn’t cashmere she’d eat her best hat!) Mrs. Lavender made an equal show of sweeping where his feet had been, though against all odds he didn’t seem to have tracked anything in. The streets, never tidy, were disastrous since the bombing started, the deep muck underlying London’s veneer of brick and mortar and tar erupting everywhere that veneer was breached, surging out of potholes and bomb craters to mix with brick dust and mist and cumber every foot with insidious grime. Even Mr. Fell, normally able to pass through the world without a smudge, took care about wiping his feet these days.

The grinning man’s wingtips twinkled on the mat and then he tried to surge back in, but Mrs. Lavender and her broom barred the way. He might not have brought in any extra filth, but a broom can always find something, and she swept with vigor, blithely ignoring the spurts of dust she sent out the door to settle on his pristine beige trousers. He cleared his throat loudly. “Excuse me! I need to get in.”

“And I need to clear the mess you’ve made or you’ll be tracking it all over the shop. Won’t be a moment.”

The grin’s oppressive heartiness morphed into something a little too cheerful to call “menace.” “I promise I won’t track any mess.”

Mrs. Lavender’s broom dug some nice grit out from between two floorboards and flicked it expertly onto the wingtips. “As if a man knows when he’s tracking mess and when he’s not!” She couldn’t bear the grin, so she focused on the broomhead, grimly holding her ground; but she could still feel it, pressing against her head and shoulders, trying to lever her out of the way.

“Ah, Gabriel,” said Mr. Fell, in his least-offensive, most off-putting customer voice. “What a pleasant surprise!”

“This human won’t let me in, Aziraphale. What’s that about?”

Mrs. Lavender suppressed the chill down her spine and gave the broom a final flourish. “Who’s not letting you in? You go traipsing in from the dirty streets without a care in the world for the hard work of decent women, keeping this place clean, and when I ask you to wait five seconds you’d think I was putting up barricades and lobbing grenades at you! I’ve always endeavored to give satisfaction but if my efforts aren’t appreciated I’m sure I needn’t hang about! There’s plenty of work to be had, though at my age I’m sure I don’t think it’s quite respectable to be going into factories, and where you’d find anybody else to oblige in these days I don’t know!” She brushed the little pile she’d made into the dustpan and reached past the visitor to dump it out beside the steps, exactly where the lightest debris would drift most readily onto the fellow’s coat.

“I have never known you not to give complete satisfaction,” said Mr. Fell. “Pray don’t let the gentleman disturb you. I’m sure he meant no harm. Mrs. Lavender, this is, is Mr. Gabriel. He has some business with me this afternoon. Gabriel, this is Mrs. Lavender, my charwoman and an absolute treasure, I assure you!”

“Yes, well, you know what they say,” said Mr. Gabriel, looking down at her disapprovingly as he brushed past her. “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, and so on. I only have a limited amount of time.”

“Of course, of course. Pray come into the back room.”

“I’ll make you up a tea tray, not that you can really call it tea, with the rationing and all.” Mrs. Lavender pulled the door to. “I’d have had it ready if you’d given me a little bit of notice but as it is I can have it for you in two ticks -“

 _“Tea tray?_ ” Mr. Gabriel might as well have been saying “sea slugs.”

Mr. Fell would have appeared normal to the unfamiliar eye; but to Mrs. Lavender, who had first seen him from her pram, and had been charring for him a dozen years now, his face was still a tad pale, his movements jerky. “That won’t be necessary, thank you,” he said. “Perhaps now would be a good time to, er, to do those errands you mentioned?”

She’d done the marketing yesterday and had no errands left for today till her scheduled shift at the canteen. She considered saying so, but the plea in Mr. Fell’s eye was for her to play along rather than push back, so she said: “Humph! Good a time as any, I suppose, and I don’t mind saving the tea and the biscuits as you may well imagine. Even when I have the coupons nothing’s to be had for love nor money.” She kept up a steady stream of grumbling as she made an unnecessary bustle of putting up her broom and dustpan, taking off her apron, locating her handbag and the string bag she carried purchases in, and pinning on her hat - a smart little number with a bit of a veil, which she had cobbled together from the shattered remains of two prewar hats, though no one would ever know it by looking. Mr. Fell got Mr. Gabriel seated in the back room (cleaner than it had been mere moments ago, with no sign of a magic act anywhere on the premises) under the cover of all this grumbling, and she was able to resign herself to leaving him, because by the time she ran out of things to fuss over he was looking steadier, and Mr. Gabriel’s horrible cheery glare was almost entirely directed at her. With any luck, she had irritated him enough that he wouldn’t have any left over for Mr. Fell.

Mrs. Lavender didn’t believe in luck. Mr. Fell hadn’t taken such a turn without good reason. Whoever Mr. Gabriel was, he must be a fiend in human form. Not the first one Mr. Fell’d ever shooed her out of the shop for, either. Just the first one she was not convinced he could handle. But, if he _couldn’t -_

She turned the sign to “Closed,” pulled the door to behind her, and took a deep breath of cold sooty air. “Oh, get a hold of yourself, Edna Lavender,” she instructed herself. “Of course Mr. Fell can handle whatever this is. But he may be in a bad way afterward. Probably want a really nice tea, and him without a bit of sugar in the house!”

Well, then, she had errands to do after all, and she stepped out briskly to do them. She always knew what she had in the kitchen, down to the last drop of golden syrup, and scant enough it was these days. He turned over the ration book to her promptly as soon as it was issued, and had told her to save the milk and sugar for the children who showed up at the canteen at all hours, and so she’d done. Mostly. 

The thing was (she skipped deftly around a pothole, simultaneously dodging the old man living in the bombed out basement of her old flat, who was now out exploring what bounty he could find in the bins), Mr. Fell knew a lot of things, and could be counted on in many a difficulty, but cloud cuckoo land was his heart’s home. He didn’t understand the rationing, and didn’t try, and had no more idea of economy than a baby. A little clever management and a few contacts among people willing to look one way while she went another, and she could get a lot more use out of a ration book than the government expected, and no harm done to the poor troops, neither! And if her pockets were a bit better lined than they would have been, too, well, she deserved a bit extra for her trouble, didn’t she?

But the trouble was - “Oi! Look where you’re going!” Blasted bicyclists - The trouble was, the new ration cards would be issued next week and in the meantime _everyone_ was out of _everything_ , including her, except for things like beans and powdered eggs, which wouldn’t cheer up nobody. And Mr. Fell, having sent the fiend in human form about his business, would need a deal of cheering up, if she knew him, and she did, as well as anybody did, which was probably as well as was good for them. Not that he made any secret about what cheered him up. She flung open the door to the canteen kitchen and strode in, letting it bang shut behind her.

“You’re early,” said Mrs. Izaks, in the faint foreign accent that still made some people uncomfortable, even knowing she’d got it running away from Hitler.

“Here, what’re you banging around for?” Sally demanded. 

“Who put a bee up your bum?” Molly asked.

“I need to make something sweet, and rich, and hot,” said Mrs. Lavender. “What’ve we got?”

“You know what we’ve got,” said Mrs. Izaks, not looking up from preparing the cheese fondant sandwich filling. “You got most of it for us. All the fortified sugar’s gone, but there’s treacle, and saccharine tablets to spare. As for fat, it’s twice-used dripping, or nothing.”

The kitchen smelled of onions and cabbage. Molly scrubbed potatoes. Sally refilled the tea urn. The noise from the front was muted, only a handful of pensioners come in early for their tea, before shifts changed and schools let out and the place filled up. Mrs. Lavender banged her way through the larder, knowing it was hopeless, unable not to try. “That won’t do,” she said. “He can’t bear saccharine! Chocolate’s not rationed! Why is there no chocolate?”

“Because we use it all and none of the shops have any, unless maybe we want to go all the way to the West End. Stop banging about, sit down, and tell us what’s got you in such a lather.” The accent nearly went away, when Mrs. Izaks got her mouth around a phrase she’d learned in England rather than in some distant European classroom. “Sally, pour her some tea.”

“It’s not steeped yet - it’ll take ages, no more than we’re able to put in it.”

“I don’t want tea!” Mrs. Lavender, who wanted tea badly - good strong tea, with real milk and two sugars, not the dishwater that was the best they could do here today - started opening canisters, weighing and measuring by eye and comparing the results to various familiar recipes. “I need something to give to Mr. Fell.”

“Why, what’d you do to him that you need to curry favor?” Sally asked. “I thought you were his favorite and all.”

Mrs. Lavender turned on her in a fury, tears stinging her eyes. “Don’t you dare say such words to me, Sally Tomkins, when you know as well as any he don’t have favorites, and just because a gentleman appreciates a good job of work and has the kindness to put a cot in the kitchen doesn’t mean he does! What’d your mam say, if she heard you saying such a thing?”

Sally looked suitably cowed. “I didn’t mean nothing by it! Goodness, what a state you’re in!”

“What’s the matter with Mr. Fell?” Mrs. Izaks dropped the spoon into the fondant, opened the linen cupboard, and pulled out The Bottle.

“Nothing’s ever the matter with Mr. Fell,” Molly protested. “That’s - that’s - he’s _Mr. Fell_.”

“Five years I live here, still I don’t know what that means.” Mrs. Izaks set a glass down in front of Mrs. Lavender and poured her a tot from The Bottle. The smell of kirschwasser bloomed into the kitchen to compete with the onions and cabbage. Mrs. Lavender drank it off, fast, letting the burn push the tears back. She’d had no idea she was going to cry, and had no desire to waste her time on it; the more so since she was almost out of powder and you couldn’t get her color anymore without you went all over town, so if she had to repair her face it would be a hardship.

“Something’s gone wrong with Mr. Fell?” The raised voices had drawn pensioners to the serving window. Mr. Raines looked concerned, but Mr. Burket scowled.

“About time something went wrong with him,” said Mr. Burket. “So high and mighty, stands to reason sooner or later he’d have to come down a peg.”

“You shut your mouth.” Mr. Raines glowered at him. “Just because he wouldn’t tell you where Polly and Nigel went, after you half killed ‘em -“

“He hadn’t no call to come between a man and his family!”

“And he didn’t, did he?” Mrs. Lavender snapped. “I remember what happened if you don’t - she ran like Jesse Owens, lugging the child and all, leaving a blood trail from your door to the bookshop and it opened to her and closed to you, and we _all_ know what _that_ means!”

 _“I_ don’t,” said Mrs. Izaks. “But I know I don’t want a lot of yelling on my shift at canteen. I’m boss this minute, yes? Than everyone can calm down and explain to me.”

Mrs. Lavender took a deep breath; Mr. Burket grumbled; Mr. Raines and Molly and Sally exchanged dubious glances; Mrs. Brown, Mrs. White, and Mrs. Cherry watched the serving window intently from their favorite table that allowed them to see out to the street and into the kitchen at will. None of this was helping. “Oh, for pity’s sake,” she said. “It’s not like you’re an outsider, not anymore. You’ve seen him about. He’s helped you.”

“He was very kind, when we first come here and my English is all wrong and only he and Jakov and me speak German and Yiddish and Polish. And I know he is...strange. Even beyond the strangeness of an Englishman speaking Polish! I have looked him in the eye and I know, _that_ was not ordinary. But what it means that the bookshop opens or closes, no one will tell me. And what can be wrong with a man like that, I can’t guess.”

“Well, that’s who he is, that’s all,” said Mrs. Lavender. “He’s always been here. He’s always looked like that. He always tips big and I won’t dispute that I’m the best paid char anywhere, though I haven’t compared notes with anybody who obliges in Buckingham Palace. He relies on our discretion, so it’s best not to speak of him any more than needs must, and if anyone from outside comes poking around - as might be the police, you know, or newspapermen, or what have you - then it’s best to have never heard of him. And if you need it - the bookshop will open to you, and close to those that’d harm you.”

“Load of hogwash,” growled Mr. Burket. “Splitting up families. Hiding loose women and nancies from the police. It’s not the bookshop that opens and closes - it’s _him,_ and he’s unnatural and uncanny.”

“He wasn’t even _there_ when Polly and Nigel escaped.” Mrs. Cherry spoke up unexpectedly. “He’d gone to Wales or somewhere, a-hunting after books, and didn’t get home till Sunday. I know, ‘cause I was looking out for him, to work out how to pay him back what I took from the till.”

That got her the slack-jawed attention of every person in the place. “You - you broke into _Mr. Fell’s till?_ ” Mrs. Brown practically squeaked; and Mrs. White shook her head, tutting.

“Not a bit! It opened right up for me.” She grinned around at them, beaming from every wrinkle. “I needed to buy the book, you know the one -“

 _“I don’t,”_ said Mrs. Izaks, sounding exhausted.

“It’s called _Lettres du Francais,_ it’s always in the same place, it always costs a farthing, and no matter how hard they are to get at the time, it’s always got rubbers in it, which I think might be why some people call ‘em French letters, but I couldn’t swear to that. It might just be Mr. Fell’s little joke. You needn’t blush and simper, Sally - we’ve all needed ‘em, one time or another, and if you haven’t yet, your time will come, with all these servicemen about, and shortages all over everywhere.” Mrs. Lavender rapped out the explanation as briskly as she could, anxious to learn at last the solution to a mystery that had puzzled her for thirty years - what _had_ happened to Polly and Nigel? “So, Polly and Nigel were in there, when you needed the book?”

“Yes; I was on my way to get it when they ran past me, and Burket there run after them as well as he could for the drink, but the other girls were counting on me and I didn’t want to go back empty-handed. So I waited while he banged and shouted at the door, till the Coates boys came round to drag him off and sober him up; and then I went on in. It opened right up for me, of course - I needed the book, see. And there was Polly bleeding and Nigel crying in the back room, and Mr. Fell nowhere to be seen, so I helped her patch her head up and calm Nigel down, and rinsed out her frock that was all blood speckled, and then we had a nice chat over some tea that was all ready on the table, just as if we’d been expected and Mr. Fell had only stepped out that moment. She said if she had sixty pounds she knew where she could go and what she could do, but she might as well need six thousand, for all the good that did, since she didn’t so much as get sight of a sixpence from one week to the next.”

“She didn’t _need_ money. I took care of her, and I’d’ve kept right on. She’d no call to run, just for a little bit of temper.” Mr. Burket spoke as one deeply aggrieved.

“You’d’ve kept her and that boy all the way to grave, you would’ve,” Mr. Raines said. “And if you don’t know that, you’re the only one here that doesn’t, so shut your gob. What’d you do, Mrs. Cherry? I won’t let him interrupt you again.”

“Well, what _could_ I do? I had five pounds to my name, myself, and I told her I’d come back with it later, and do a whip round among the girls and see if we couldn’t manage it; and then I got the book, and went to put the farthing in the till, which I’d done when he was out before and a thing you must know, Mrs. Izaks, is, that till never has a cent in it, unless you count a half of a ninepence that I was never so bold as to ask him about. We used to break ‘em like that, for love tokens, and I’m not sure I want to know what he’s got one for. But this time, I opened it up and there was a stack of six ten pound notes in the drawer!”

Mrs. Lavender had been expecting this from the moment the sixty pounds had been mentioned, but the rest of the assemblage was suitably astonished, and Mrs. Cherry seemed gratified by the response; not least by the fact that Mr. Burket looked and sounded as if he were about to have a fit.

“But she never agreed to rob Mr. Fell!” Mrs. Brown protested. “I wouldn’t never have thought it of her!”

“Well, she wouldn’t and all,” agreed Mrs. Cherry. “Only I promised her solemnly I’d do the whip round with the girls and put it all back, and glad to do it, for more than one of us had run for our lives before then and we knew what it was like. And I told her I’d explain what had happened to Mr. Fell, myself. So I sat with her till her clothes dried, and we cleaned up the tea things, and then I walked them to the station and saw them safe onto the train so soon as it was dark enough, before I finally took the book back to the girls, and weren’t they impatient! But among us over the next couple of days we scraped the sixty pounds together.”

“From the wages of sin,” muttered Mr. Burket. Molly shushed him.

“But would you believe it? When I tried to get into the bookshop to put it back, it wouldn’t open to me! So I asked the children that hung about in those days to let me know when Mr. Fell got home, and come Sunday one of them came and got me, so I called on him and told him the whole story. And you know what he said?”

“He didn’t take your sixty pounds, I’ll go bail on that,” said Mrs. Brown, to universal agreement.

“No, he did not! He smiled at me like, like - well, the really _good_ smile, the one that makes you feel like he’s a little boy and you’re Christmas morning - _you_ know.”

They did; even Mrs. Izaks did; even Mr. Burket, who sagged and blinked, though how he’d ever been on the receiving end of it Mrs. Lavender couldn’t think. Mrs. Cherry plowed on, quivering with happiness. “He said I’d done exactly right, what he’d have done himself if he’d been home, but as for paying him back, he’d tell me what he told everyone in straits that he’d ever been able to help out a bit, that somebody out there needed the money more than he did, and the girls and I would oblige him if we saw that somebody got it. I asked if he had anybody in mind and he said no indeed, he doubted his judgement in the matter would be any better than ours.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Burket. “So you kept it to yourself!”

Mrs. Cherry tossed her head. “What fun would that be? I would’ve felt I’d gotten the smile under false pretenses, if I’d gone and robbed the girls like that! No, I took it back to them and we had a grand time, deciding who to give it to, and how. Turned out we knew a lot more people who would be greatly relieved by a pound or two turning up, than we did people who’d know what to do with sixty pounds if it fell on their heads, so for the next couple of weeks we made a game of laying down a bit here and a bit there, where there couldn’t be any mistake about who it was for, and then slipping away before anyone noticed.”

Mrs. Lavender’s mouth fell open, and tears stung her eyes again. “That was _you_?”

Mrs. Cherry laughed like a young girl - like a much younger girl than Mrs. Lavender ever remembered her being - and clapped her hands. “It was! You were _such_ a love in the dress your mam got for you with it - we were so chuffed, every time we saw you dolled up so pretty for school.”

Mrs. Lavender blinked, and swallowed, and swallowed again, before turning to Mrs. Izaks and saying: “There you are, then. _That’s_ who Mr. Fell is, and can you blame us for not going around gossiping about it? Tea from nowhere, bookshops that know when they’re needed, exactly the right money at the right time, and when he smiles at you, you want to do - want to do something to _deserve_ it, even though he says deserving’s got nothing to do with anything. And now there’s a horrid loud man in the shop, which shouldn’t make him turn a hair, but you should have _seen_ him, like he was seeing a ghost, positively green and shuddery, and I don’t know what’s going on but I know he’ll need something sweet, and rich, and hot, and none of this saccharine business.”

“This man - frightens him?” Mrs. Izaks sounded puzzled. “Why?”

 _“I don’t know,”_ Mrs. Lavender croaked. Mrs. Izaks poured her another tot out of The Bottle. “But if _he’s_ afraid - and the bookshop couldn’t keep Mr. Gabriel out - “ Her hand shook, but she got the kirschwasser down.

Mr. Burket made a strangled sound, then tried again. “Eyes,” he said, his voice gone peculiar. “Did this horrid loud man have purple eyes?”

Mrs. Lavender hadn’t been looking at him, had never liked looking at him since the day she’d realized she lived upstairs from a man who was only not a murderer by the grace of the bookshop, but she turned her head sharply and tried to look straight into his head now. “How did you know?”

“I don’t - I won’t talk about it,” he quavered. “I was only a lad. Hiding behind the counter. Decided I’d dreamed it. But - purple eyes! _Ugh!_ ” He shuddered. “Cocoa. We were both crying and he made us cocoa. Best cup I ever had in my life.”

“My Stella has baking chocolate put by,” said Mrs. White. “Makes a better cup than cocoa powder, for my money, though it is a bit of extra mess.”

“We could make it with condensed milk?” Molly sounded doubtful.

“If we had any of that, either,” said Sally. “We’ve got some powdered, but if saccharine won’t do I don’t see that powdered milk will, either.”

“Oh, as for _that_ ,” said Mrs. Cherry, levering herself to her feet with her stick. “Let me borrow your telephone, ducks?” 

Molly brought it to the counter and Mr. Burket shuffled out of her way to lean against the wall, chewing his lip and visibly turning something over and over in his head. Mrs. Cherry gave a number to Mabel at the exchange, and waited, humming “White Cliffs of Dover” and leaning against the counter. Mrs. Lavender could tell the moment the line picked up, by the way her posture changed. “Good afternoon, dearie! I’d like to speak to Ronald please...Yes, that’s what I said...You tell him it’s Mrs. Cherry...Thank you, dear...Oh, now, Ronald, I know, and I wouldn’t normally, but I’m in a bit of a pickle and I didn’t think you’d want me calling your wife...No, no, nothing like that...Only I need a cup of milk...I know, but it’s by way of being an emergency...That would be lovely!...The canteen on Golden Square, soon as you can manage...Oh, yes, sooner the better...You’re a lamb! Thanks ever so!...Usual time, and I expect to see pictures of that new little grandchild! Ta!” She hung up and returned the phone to Molly. “It’ll be here in a quarter of an hour or so. Now we only need to track down the cocoa and sugar.”

“I thought you were retired,” said Sally.

Mrs. Cherry tossed her head and preened. “When a gentleman’s been coming to see you on the regular for forty years, it’s no hardship to keep accommodating him. This is not the first time it’s been useful to have an in at a dairy, either. It pays to maintain good connections.”

“It _wasn’t_ Mr. Fell that took them away,” said Mr. Burket, his eyes fixed on the middle distance. “It was those whores. Right. I’ll be back.” He hurried out the door as fast as his bum leg could take him.

“Let me call Stella,” said Mrs. White.

Stella, on being informed that it was needed for Mr. Fell, was happy to spare some of her baking chocolate, but couldn’t leave the baby, so Mrs. Lavender undertook to fetch it on her way back to the shop. The first two people called after that only had saccharine tablets left, and Mrs. Lavender was about to try a third when Mr. Burket returned, short of breath and clutching a small box, which he pitched down on the counter.

“All right, I’m a hoarder,” he said defiantly. “There’s three people in this room right now dealing black market, not to mention the whores, and if I weren’t a hoarder and Mrs. Cherry wasn’t a whore there’d be no milk and no sugar and no cocoa for Mr. Fell, would there? So I don’t want to hear a word about it!”

“Nor will you,” said Mrs. Lavender, staring at the box of sugar cubes. “Thank you, Mr. Burket. Mrs. Izaks, I’ll need something to carry this in -“ She reached to pluck out a cube.

“Take the whole thing!” Mr. Burket practically slapped her hand away. “ _Thirty years_ I’ve blamed him, and he never knew where Polly and Nigel went at all! And now the purple-eyed man - take it all! I don’t want it! I have more at home and you can’t get a decent tea to put it in nowadays anyhow! Just - take _all_ of it!” He turned and half-ran, half-staggered out, as if afraid someone would stop him. 

Well, no chance of that; everyone in the canteen was too flabbergasted, and no one was fond of his company anyway. “I won’t need all of this,” said Mrs. Lavender. “Though I won’t be such a fool as to let us run out again, no matter how much he says he don’t need it. Where’s the canister?”

At this point a bewildered man on a bicycle arrived bearing a half-pint bottle of fresh milk with cream on the top (Ronald at the dairy must be really fond of Mrs. Cherry, then, not just afraid of what she’d tell his wife), and she soon had it and the now half-full box of sugar cubes safe in her string bag. She got Stella’s address from Mrs. White and bore the good wishes of everyone in the place along with her. 

Stella met her at the door, clutching the paper-wrapped chocolate in the hand not occupied with holding the baby on her shoulder. “You give him that with our blessings,” she said, “and tell him she hasn’t had croup once since that time he minded her in the tube.”

“He’ll be glad to hear it,” said Mrs. Lavender. “Thank you.”

Anxiety and anger had carried her to the canteen, and the good will of her neighbors had joined them to carry her forward from there; but as she turned her feet back toward the bookshop, the fear of Mr. Gabriel roused itself, slowing her pace, speeding her pulse. “Come now,” she admonished herself. “He didn’t offer you any harm, did he? You don’t even know what you’re afraid of!” Her breath hitched; for the sheer unknowableness of the threat was the worst part. 

She hadn’t seen it herself, but her mother had told her once, that she’d seen Mr. Fell come out of a burning building with a child on each arm and a kitten in his pocket, complaining that his coat would reek of smoke for weeks. He pulled coins out of ears and endless strings of handkerchiefs out of pockets, bubbling over with joy, while death rained out of the skies. He had stood between her and her worst nightmare and it had collapsed under the weight of his disapproval, dwindling down into a mere man, never to trouble her again. 

What Mr. Fell feared, had to be worth fearing.

But if even Mr. Burket could fight his way through his own nastiness for his sake, Edna Lavender would not be the one to let him down! Why, she was responsible for him, she was, on behalf of the whole neighborhood. She gritted her teeth and pressed on through the Soho crowds and the horror shrouding what was normally the safest place in London, the reassuring weight of the string bag with its load of milk, chocolate, sugar, and love tapping her thigh with each step. 

She was a block away and could see the door of the bookshop clearly above the heads of the passersby when it opened and Mr. Gabriel surged out, seeming to shine with an unnatural radiance that had nothing to do with the soot-streaked light making its way down from the overcast sky today. Mr. Fell had the same trick, sometimes, but where he glowed with warmth and safety, Mr. Gabriel was like a walking magnesium flare. Her feet faltered in spite of her; but he jogged down the stairs and up the street in the opposite direction, people making way for him as they might make way for a lorry, and he was soon lost to sight. She moved faster, then, fear shifting from amorphous anticipation for what might be about to happen to sharp anxiety as to what she’d find at the bookshop.

The sign was still turned to Closed, but the door was unlocked, the shop floor empty and as orderly as it ever was. “I’m back, Mr. Fell,” she called, walking nice and loud, divesting herself of hat and coat and handbag as she bustled into the back room, feeling all the while that she wasn’t fooling anybody.

Mr. Fell sat in his armchair. Just sat, not reading, in the light of a single lamp, his hands twisting in his lap, deep wrinkles in his forehead, eyes fixed on something a thousand miles or years away. Mrs. Lavender didn’t think he’d heard her; was absolutely certain he didn’t see her, or he would have tried to smile. She carried the string bag downstairs to the kitchen.

It was an old-fashioned - a very old-fashioned indeed - London basement kitchen, made smaller by the partitioning off of a section for the bathroom sometime (at a guess) in the 1870s, and crowded now by the addition of the cot she’d been sleeping in since the first air raid of the war, when her lodgings had taken a direct hit. He’d made room for her clothes in the kitchen dresser and talked about how convenient it would be for him, as if he weren’t saving her from having to sleep on the street or beg space from someone else who didn’t have any to spare. The range was always lit, no matter how scarce fuel got or how long it had been since she fed it last, and she wasted no time getting chocolate melting in the porcelain-lined pipkin. 

She hovered over it as she hadn’t hovered since her daughter (now driving an ambulance and living in a dormitory) was a delicate-stomached infant, mixing in the sugar, adding the milk a little at a time and heating it gently, so gently, it would not do to scorch the stuff; whisking the mixture into a froth, all a lovely even brown; arranging the last of the shortbreads on the Royal Doulton plate; pouring into the larger, thicker cups he liked to use for cocoa; getting it all together on the silver tray, exactly the way he liked it. She had left the door ajar at the top of the stairs, knowing she’d have her hands full going up again; and not one sound did she hear from up there, the whole time. When she carried it back up, he was still sitting as he had been when she arrived.

Mrs. Lavender set the tray down on the table at his elbow and said brightly: “Here you go, Mr. Fell! I made us some nice cocoa! I should just have time to drink mine off before I have to go into the canteen.”

He started, turned his head to look at her, and smiled a smile that almost broke her heart. “Oh! Goodness, I didn’t even hear you come in. Lost in thought, as they say. Not a, not a very difficult labyrinth for me to get lost in, I’m afraid. Cocoa? How lovely! You really shouldn’t have - I know there’s shortages.” He picked up the nearer (and fuller) cup and cradled it between his hands - square as a workman’s, soft as a lord’s.

“Not so short yet that you can’t have a drop of cocoa of an afternoon once in awhile, trust me for that,” said Mrs. Lavender, taking her own cup and turning on a second lamp. “Drink up before it gets cold.”

He drank, and she had the satisfaction of watching his face as he did. The man was a pure pleasure to cook for, even on an ordinary day. Today she got to watch the flavor and warmth spread through him like a good fire in a well-kept grate, easing the worried wrinkles out of his forehead in favor of crinkling the corners of his eyes, cheeks pinking up as they rounded and relaxed and he emerged, smiling, with - oh, yes! - a subtle little all-body wiggle that many people wouldn’t have noticed, but which Mrs. Lavender knew to be the highest accolade she could receive. “Oh!” He said. “I believe this is the best cup of cocoa I’ve had since before the war started! You really are a treasure, Mrs. Lavender. Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Lavender.

-30-


End file.
